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It’s been a long time between swigs of champagne at NASCAR’s biggest race for the sport’s biggest star.

In fact, the last time Dale Earnhardt Jr. celebrated a win in the Daytona 500 was 2004 — nine long seasons ago — when he was still driving for the family firm in the No. 8 Dale Earnhardt Incorporated Chevrolet.

But the smart betting is that on Sunday — in the 55th running of the Great American Race — Earnhardt could well be in the winner’s circle at the end of the afternoon in the Hendrick Motorsports No. 88 Chevrolet.

The 38-year-old son of NASCAR’s most treasured racer comes into the 2013 season rejuvenated after ending a crushingly long three-year winless skid last season with a victory at Michigan International Speedway.

Earnhardt appears to have his mojo back and is clicking with crew chief Steve Latarte.

There was a time between 2001 — when his dad, Dale Earnhardt, was killed in a tragic crash at that year’s Daytona 500 — and 2006 when Earnhardt was without peer on the high banked restrictor plate tracks of Daytona and Talladega.

The swift decline in his fortunes on the track had a lot to do with NASCAR introducing the so-called Car of Tomorrow in 2007.

Earnhardt, unlike his Hendrick teammates, never seemed to get comfortable in the COT, and it showed in his performances.

The introduction of the Generation 6 car this season, however, brought a huge smile on Earnhardt’s face, because it is universally viewed as a throwback to the kind of race cars he loved to drive — the ones in which Earnhardt rolled out 17 wins in his first five Sprint Cup seasons.

And he doesn’t hide his anticipation at getting in the car for Sunday’s big race.

“It’s a great car,” Earnhardt said. “I say positive things about it because that’s the way I feel. I think it’s a great direction we’re going in. The potential is there for us to really enjoy this car.”

He said what race fans saw in the Budweiser Duel 150s on Thursday — long, single file racing — is what they should expect on Sunday.

It is the kind of racing Earnhardt loves, where driver skill and horsepower is more important than finding a drafting partner to push, or pull, to the front.

“You’ll see a lot of racing,” he said. “It’ll be single file around the bottom some. It will be single file around the top some. Then all of a sudden everybody will start racing for no apparent reason.

“Then it’ll go back to running single file for awhile. We don’t really dictate that as driver.

“I think it will be a good race. It’s a long race, you know. We can’t run three-wide every lap as much as everybody would like to see that. I think it’s good racing.”

Earnhardt is especially excited to be part of a half-dozen or so drivers considered favourites to win this year’s Daytona 500.

“I think we were in the conversation last year,” he said. “Maybe this year, if we can step it up another notch, we’d be right there where we’ve been striving to be the last couple years. It isn’t going to take much to improve over last year and be one of the top teams. We were pretty close last year and I feel pretty good about that.”

Earnhardt said he needs to contend for wins every time out this season to be considered among the elite of the sport.

“We need to win more than one race a year,” he told USA Today this week. “I think we need to win three. Hell, six would be awesome. We need to win a handful of races for me personally to be satisfied.

“We’ve talked and talked and talked about being in the title hunt at Homestead. To make that reality happen, anything less than that would be disappointing.”

After the Duel 150s — where Earnhardt finished ninth in the first race — he said that the No. 88 Chevrolet was tight, something that the team is going to have to fix before Sunday.

“Our car was really, really tight,” he said. “I was having to lift in the centre of (turns) three and four, just to get off the corner. I figured we would be fighting loose a little bit. We have to work on it. We will; we’ll fix it.”

Despite the handling issues — the team will have final practice Saturday to work on it — Earnhardt is optimistic about his chances on Sunday in spite of the fact he will start at the back of the grid after changing engines earlier in the week.

“Anybody can win, but we’ve got a good piece,” he said. “We’ve got a real good car. We get that balance right, and get the thing to turning good, we’ll have a great shot.”

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Great expectations for Earnhardt

It’s been a long time between swigs of champagne at NASCAR’s biggest race for the sport’s biggest star.

In fact, the last time Dale Earnhardt Jr. celebrated a win in the Daytona 500 was 2004 — nine long seasons ago — when he was still driving for the family firm in the No. 8 Dale Earnhardt Incorporated Chevrolet.

But the smart betting is that on Sunday — in the 55th running of the Great American Race — Earnhardt could well be in the winner’s circle at the end of the afternoon in the Hendrick Motorsports No. 88 Chevrolet.

The 38-year-old son of NASCAR’s most treasured racer comes into the 2013 season rejuvenated after ending a crushingly long three-year winless skid last season with a victory at Michigan International Speedway.

Earnhardt appears to have his mojo back and is clicking with crew chief Steve Latarte.

There was a time between 2001 — when his dad, Dale Earnhardt, was killed in a tragic crash at that year’s Daytona 500 — and

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